41–50 of 112 posts
For a while now, I've pondered the creation of a new scientific society, something which has the same 'vibe' as the Royal Society did in the late 1800 early 1900's. Sort of a 'gentlepersons group' of critical thinkers. The promise is freeing science to once again flourish, the danger is something like TEDx. A society to promote the pursuit of science by the common man or woman, with rigorous debate and discussion. A…
I've been doing a lot of analysis of organizational decline over the past month, and what characterizes R&D (including academia) is extreme convexity: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/03/14/gervais-macle... Convexity pertains to the shape of the curve for output (profits, value added, impact) per input (investment, skill, effort, and just plain luck). It pertains to desirable risk behavior (convex => seek ris…
I'm in academia right now, and this is indeed a problem. I generally only meet two kinds of academics: the perpetually tired (like myself) and the perpetually energetic. This may have something to do with the ways our bodies metabolize the utterly ubiquitous, universal stimulants (ie: loads and loads of caffeine) we take to cope with our relatively long working hours (it's not that unusual, for myself as a grad student or for many professors I've met, to start the day at 9:30am and finally leave for home at 7:30pm, then still be answering emails and doing work at home until it's time to sleep).
I'm perpetually tired because I keep developing a tolerance for the stuff every time I find a stronger coffee, and the habit of Israeli institutions is to start early in the morning, so I keep having to override my natural sleep rhythm with coffee -- thus requiring me to find ever-stronger caffeine sources even though what I really need is to just wake up somewhere from 8:30-9am and have one cup of black tea.
The moral lesson (and it applies to us as programmers, too) is that teaching (for us, documentation and outreach) isn't commodity grunt work. It's vital. It's often where most of the value is added. If you blow teaching off, the world will lose interest in you and pull investment. I would say "you deserve it" but, in the academic sphere, it's a different (younger) set of people getting whacked for it.
Hmmm.... I semi-object. It's not that teaching is unimportant, but that the whole dichotomy is really a spectrum. There's undergraduate-level teaching, graduate-level teaching, colleague-level teaching, documented research (ie: publishing), and your own research notes. The institutional problem is that you need a full spectrum of different methods and expectations for each role.
It's easy to say that we need to emphasize research less and undergrad teaching more, but what's really happened is that an originally unified role (the Full Professor of teaching and research) has grown apart, as the research frontier, and even the grad-level teaching frontiers taught to MSc and PhD students, pull steadily further and further away from the capacity of the undergraduate curriculum.
IMNSHO, we need to have a lot more respect for teachers, but we also just need to eliminate middle school. Ok, now that I have your attention: the skill level required to do Real Work, in both industry and research, has gone up, so we need to find ways to stop wasting our youth's time in redundant so-called education they neither want nor need and get them properly specialized and skilled once they show some talent and direction instead of just expecting to pump out Yet Another 1000 Engineering Grads.
The article implies that Microryza funds independent scientists, but their website says they only fund scientists working at established academic institutions, and I verified in the last discussion of the subject [1] that that was indeed the case, at least for now. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5280236
For a while now, I've pondered the creation of a new scientific society, something which has the same 'vibe' as the Royal Society did in the late 1800 early 1900's. Sort of a 'gentlepersons group' of critical thinkers. The promise is freeing science to once again flourish, the danger is something like TEDx. A society to promote the pursuit of science by the common man or woman, with rigorous debate and discussion. A…
A lot of institutions like this exist and if you compare them with traditional universities, the results are at best inconclusive. Compare IAS to Princeton, for example. Is the quality of research at the IAS better than at Princeton? I really doubt it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is no higher value free market alternative to academic research. This does not exist. Publication is a different issue altogether. What do you have in mind - huge companies like Microsoft trying things and occasionally letting out crumbs? People blogging their speculations about the cause of autism? The problem with depending 100% on non-academic research is that either real information is not being produced in…
Perhaps you have not heard of Microsoft Research. [1] [1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Research
For a while now, I've pondered the creation of a new scientific society, something which has the same 'vibe' as the Royal Society did in the late 1800 early 1900's. Sort of a 'gentlepersons group' of critical thinkers. The promise is freeing science to once again flourish, the danger is something like TEDx. A society to promote the pursuit of science by the common man or woman, with rigorous debate and discussion. A…
Gentlemen scientists tended to be free of the responsibilities of the common man. The vibe of the Royal Society was a bunch of stuck up nobility debating worthless issues. There is a vain of thought that says science was promoted during the enlightenment precisely because it distracted the nobility from aspiring for social change. Voltaire in Candide mocked this with a debate, if I recall on sheep color.
The one person I feel most strongly about this is Elizabeth Iorns. Elizabeth was named one of the 10 most important people by Nature last year, for her work in the Reproducibility Initiative and with Science Exchange ( http://www.nature.com/news/366-days-nature-s-10-1.11997 ). She is one of the most genuinely passionate researchers I know, and she cares deeply about doing good science. If she is not teaching the next…
You have very successful sites in this space, and Microryza doesn't seem to offer much beyond these in exchange for their smaller user base and less validated templates and formats (please correct me if I am wrong). It seems to me that everyone on Microryza would have been better served by using Kickstarter or one of the other more established options in this space.
So why don't they? Why does Microryza exist?
To me the answer is the standard academic elitism. A persuasive thread in academia is that everything outside academia is inferior to what is done by the elite in the ivory tower. So accept the long hours and long pay, because you are a member of the elite. Research this arcane irrelevant problem, because you are a member of the elite. Submit to only these few journals and conferences, because you are a member of the elite. Etc. Etc. Mycroryza seems to be embracing this elitism.
Now, this isn't to bash on Microryza; if they can pull academia into this space, that would be fantastic. But I think the fact that they need to exist to make it happen is a shame.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Perhaps you have not heard of Microsoft Research. [1] [1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Research
I took a random sample of 25 papers from: http://research.microsoft.com/apps/catalog/default.aspx?p=1&... 68% of the authors hold academic positions.
University of Washington has many 'sponsored' positions, but basically what it amounts to is Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft giving money in exchange for that researcher's time. Latest example would be Babak Parviz, EE prof who spends all time at Google (http://news.cs.washington.edu/2013/01/26/babak-parviz-on-goo...)